


With a Little Help From My Friends (the Old Haunts Remix of a story by Tifaching)

by chemm80



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-02
Updated: 2014-12-02
Packaged: 2018-02-27 19:51:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2704502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chemm80/pseuds/chemm80





	With a Little Help From My Friends (the Old Haunts Remix of a story by Tifaching)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [With A Little Help From My Friends](https://archiveofourown.org/works/169444) by [tifaching](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tifaching/pseuds/tifaching). 



**Title** : With a Little Help From My Friends (the Old Haunts Remix)  
 **Author** : [](http://chemm80.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://chemm80.livejournal.com/)**chemm80**  
 **Pairing** : Gen, Sam and Dean  
 **Rating** : G  
 **Warnings/Contains** : None  
 **Spoilers** : AU for the end of Season 5

**Title, Author & URL of the original story**: Remix of [With a Little Help From My Friends](http://tifaching.livejournal.com/24147.html) by [](http://tifaching.livejournal.com/profile)[**tifaching**](http://tifaching.livejournal.com/).

Thanks to [](http://oschun.livejournal.com/profile)[**oschun**](http://oschun.livejournal.com/) for the beta.

**Summary** : _Sam wanders, but it’s not aimless. Something draws him to the places he finds himself revisiting. A location (_ coordinates _), a shadow on the continuum of his existence that he might once have called_ time _, that tantalizing hint of some tenuous connection to Dean that he feels when he gets there—he is compelled to the islands of his memory._

The end of the world.

The words are meaningless to Sam, had almost become so even before the final battle, he’d heard them so often. Sam’s world certainly ended on that last day in Detroit. Shattered, bloodied and broken, he and Dean defied the angels and demons alike.

It was a day of awe and wonder, when each of them finally found and recognized the other for what he was—touchstone and anchor, rock and safe harbor. The love that had almost broken the world had saved it again in that one perfect moment.

It was a day of despair when, just as suddenly, he’d lost Dean again.

That was all very long ago now, Sam suspects, though he has no way of knowing for sure.

Sam wanders, but it’s not aimless. Something draws him to the places he finds himself revisiting. A location ( _coordinates_ ), a shadow on the continuum of his existence that he might once have called _time_ , that tantalizing hint of some tenuous connection to Dean that he feels when he gets there—he is compelled to the islands of his memory.

Right place, right time. No Dean.

Dean always said he didn’t remember the names, the faces, once they’d moved on from a job, but Sam knew better. Michael, Sari, Emily…the children were the ones Dean especially couldn’t forget. Their young lives spared but their innocence in shreds…how could that not resonate with Dean? Dean spent his life trying to prevent his own tragedy from befalling others.

Sam’s never really known anything else, of course. No mother…no sweet, safe home. Just Dean.  
And now the memory of _before_ is all that’s left to Sam, his only connection to his brother. Dean’s gone and Sam is still here, not alive but not really dead, either, and Sam tries not to think the word “forever” even if that’s what he suspects he’s facing. Alone.

Sometimes Sam still sees them, the ones they saved. They rarely notice him—the living, those corporeal ghosts who haunt the earth with impunity—and Sam prefers it that way. Whatever he may have done to destroy the world or save it, few of those who are left would want any part of a Winchester, if they knew. Sam has no desire to draw their attention to his soiled, tattered soul. He has nothing in common with them anymore, doesn’t remember the sensation of being one of them, even though he hasn’t forgotten the fact of it.

Occasionally, though, in some misguided attempt to harm Sam, or banish him, one of the still-living will threaten him in such a way as to make him recall very clearly what hunting was like.

He makes them sorry.

He remembers the jobs—the monsters, the wins and the failures, and Dean. Beyond that he knows little. The world moves on and he stays the same. Sadness and loss and guilt are all he has left; they are what he is. No wonder he’s invisible.

Although time is a vaguely foreign concept that doesn’t affect Sam in any recognizable way, it flows on around him, somehow. He can make himself know this if he tries, can force himself to acknowledge the existence of time in the ways its passage erodes the world he wanders, this prison realm in which he no longer belongs but can’t leave behind. The march of time is apparent in the way his old haunts deteriorate and crumble, evident in the ravaged faces of the few who remember him and Dean. And they do remember: he can see it in their eyes, the recognition on their faces when he summons enough strength to materialize.

He started his journey, this never-ending quest, by looking in the place where it began. Or at least he thinks so. The period immediately after The End That Wasn’t is not clear to him at all—his grasp on the sequence of events since he almost ended the world even less so—but that’s where his vague recollection starts, at the old house in Lawrence, the place where his world went up in flames for the first time. The first of many.

Sam doesn’t experience physical sensation. The cold, the rain, the baking sun—none of these faze him. But when he finds himself inside the house in Lawrence, _awakens_ there (though he never sleeps), he can feel the heat of the flaming entity, hear his mother’s whispered “I’m sorry.”

And he can see Sari. This Sari is not as young and frightened as the girl he remembers, though she is afraid of him. With minimal effort he can still see the traumatized child inside her.

She knows him too; he doesn’t doubt it. And he asks his questions, for the first time. She cannot help him, though, and he moves on.

He asks again in the art gallery, and again in the vacant lot where the antique store full of mirrors once stood. He shouts it across a dried-up lake bed, cries it on a suburban street in Indiana.

“Have you seen my brother?” he asks the beautiful woman. She is fearless, and her connection to Dean is so apparent to Sam that he whispers it, almost hopeful. “Is Dean here?” _Cassie…in Missouri_ , something whispers in return, and he remembers. Not that it matters.

Again and again, across the country he asks, in so many places that he only really recognizes once he sees the faces that belong to the locations, the lives that wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Sam and Dean.

It bothered him a little, at first, the way these people ( _Ben…Lucas_ ), especially the children (who aren’t that anymore; it’s been too long), keep showing up at the scenes of the crimes against them. Why return to the site of such horror? Maybe they’re drawn by the same odd force that compels him, Sam sometimes thinks. But overall, curiosity is something Sam has little energy or concentration for, so “why” is a question he never asks of them.

He keeps moving, unable to stop, or die, or _end_ in any way. Maybe there is a pattern to his travels, some logical progression that would have made sense to him once, but such things are beyond Sam now. He feels a tug pulling him toward a certain place, and he knows it’s time to go there, to chase the faint hope that Dean will be there too, somehow. He never is.

It hurts every time, the aching loss of it replenishing the well of sadness inside him, the grief. Sam embraces it all, holds the desolation close and wallows in it, draws strength from it somehow. He deserves the pain anyway. If Dean ( _A Righteous Man_ ) is gone from the earth, he’s in a place where Sam ( _Vessel of Satan_ ) can’t follow.

If Dean is gone from the earth, it’s Sam’s fault.

The apple orchard seems to materialize around him, clarity from clouds. The trees are gnarled and overgrown, the ones that aren’t dead. Left untended, the grove collapses in on itself in slow motion, retreating back into the soil from whence it came. The skeletal branches look unsubstantial, phantoms of their former glory.

Sam doesn’t even try to remember how many times he’s been here before, but it’s a lot, he thinks. More often than the other grim memorials he revisits, this one attracts him. He thinks he’s found Dean here before, maybe, reclaimed Dean from this spot somehow in some half-forgotten age.

_This place…here_ , it whispers. _Dean was here._

He isn’t, though. Just an old man ( _a young boy…Michael_ ) who doesn’t belong here and is yet familiar, and Sam isn’t surprised to see him, really. Not that Sam cares whether he stays or goes. The man is Not Dean.

Sam speaks to the man anyway, can’t help repeating the words in the same sequence every time, like a mantra that won’t stop circling his consciousness. “Have you seen my brother? Is Dean here?”

“He’s not here…” the man says, and there are more words coming out of him but Sam stops listening. They are meaningless. The negative answer seeps into his being and he feels it like vertigo, a draining of energy that makes him less solid with every repetition. Dean’s not here. He readies himself for his leave-taking, gathers his will for the next leg of the journey.

“Hey, bitch…where do you think you’re goin’?”

Sam can’t stop himself from turning back toward the familiar voice, never could, even though he knows better. He’s thought he heard Dean a few times over the years, in places like this, but it was always false, some trick, and he can’t believe…and yet, he turns. Falls into arms that wrap around him, that seem so solid, so real, so very much like…

“Dean?”


End file.
